He was a colonial governor of the Province of Maine from 1640 to 1643 and served as an officer in the Parliamentary Army during the English Civil War.

[1] The province was at the time a small number of sparsely populated communities in present-day southern Maine.

Thomas was a Puritan, and established friendly relations with the nearby Massachusetts Bay Colony, whose governor John Winthrop described him as "sober and well-disposed".

[2] Gorges was responsible for establishing a stable government in Maine, something his relative William had been unable to do a few years earlier.

He married secondly on 23 March 1658, Rose Mallock, widow of Roger Mallock of Cockington, Devon, and daughter of Sir Jerome Alexander, Justice of the Court of Common Pleas of Ireland and his wife Elizabeth Havers, with whom he had a son and daughter.